What Retweet Curves Can Reveal

A recent New York Times article touched off a debate about fake twitter followers and whether they are becoming a big business. Now a small diagnostic start-up called Fluid has found an interesting twist on the topic by actually measuring the retweet profiles of a few leading tech blogs. The fascinating thing about this little project is that most leading blogs seem to have quite natural profiles. Tweets sent by Mashable create a gradually building swell of retweets, curving gracefully as a swan's neck as people on the Twitter discover the article on Mashable and then opt to recommend it after reading the piece.

But the retweet curve of The Next Web is strange indeed. It jumps abruptly by 100, 200 or 400 retweets in an eye blink and then seems to stop growing at all. This sudden avalanche of retweets happens to look precisely like an artificial boost created by zombie retweeters. A few seconds later, the RT activity stops as suddenly as it started.

Of course, accusing The Next Web of using bought retweets to inflate the apparent popularity of its articles would be beyond the pale. After all, the site has published articles clearly explaining how fake Twitter followers are "not worth the risk". As a matter of fact, one such article received more than 800 retweets!

It will be interesting to see if retweet profiling will catch on as a kind of ethical litmus test in the future. The media industry could probably use one; companies ranging from Disney to News Corp may want to know about the RT profiles of their various properties compared to honest industry benchmarks. If innocent sites are being targeted by ruthless fake RT accounts without their knowledge they may want to take action. Surely any honest, medium-sized blog would want to put an end to a charade such as pretending to have articles more popular than Mashable's?

I have reached out to several people at The Next Web and will be updating the article if I receive a comment.

Update: The CEO of The Next Web emailed me and pointed out that TNW had earlier offered a feature that helped people automatically to retweet about the site content. The feature was discontinued eight months ago, but it may still automatically add RT's to all TNW tweets. TNW did not pay for these robo-RT's.